NBN and Mr Fluffy overreach remind us why governments should lead, not command

The world is a more complex place than it used to be, and it’s generally accepted that governments need to work more flexibly than in the past. It’s all the more surprising, then, that, in the case of the national broadband network, Australian governments have opted for an old-fashioned, top-down, …

Labor’s light rail political brilliance should not be confused with good policymaking

There is no doubt that plebiscites are powerful indicators of public opinion. As the Brexit vote showed, when the people speak in this way, it is impossible to ignore. Paradoxically, the power of plebiscites to address highly charged issues, may also be an argument against them. Here in Australia, Labor …

On reading

In the year 2000, Colombian politician and academic Oscar Tulio Lizcano was kidnapped by the guerilla organisation known as the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and spent almost 3000 days in captivity in the jungle. Eventually, with the aid of one of his captors, he managed to escape, …

Do we really know how to be green?

While decluttering recently (it’s been that sort of summer), I re-discovered a little booklet put out by the Commonwealth Greenhouse Office in 2000 called Global Warming: cool it. While the Greenhouse Office has long since gone to the bureaucratic graveyard and global warming has morphed into climate change, the booklet is …

Hooked on students

When I taught public policy, one of the key ideas I tried to put across, was that when you create a public policy, you create a system, and vice versa. One of the reasons, I argued, that policies often produced surprising effects was that the links between different parts of these systems were not well-understood.

Governments necessarily operate bureaucratically, which means that the types of systems they run are disguised by the myriad classes and classifications they use to process reality. Usually, the insiders know what is going on, although for those in government trying to keep control of it all, it may take time to catch up with some effects. But for those on the outside, it is much more difficult to piece the data together.

Revisiting The Secret River

There are essentially two kinds of novel set in the past. In the first, we follow the fortunes of a real person, such as Henry VIII’s Chief Minister Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist of Hilary Mantel’s celebrated trilogy. This is a flexible genre, in which the portrait does not have to be accurate to be convincing: witness Peter Carey’s brilliant impersonation of Ned Kelly in True history of the Kelly gang. These works stand or fall according to the psychological interest they create.